| Find yourself a perfect partner: another man.  Which brings us to another major theme in the article, the demonization of men. If it was just you doing this stuff I suppose we could write it off to some percentage of individual women having "issues," but alas, it isn't just you.
Christina Hoff Sommers tells the story of how the "Superbowl Sunday" myth got started. A bunch of self-appointed Professional Feminists staged a press conference where they totally misrepresented a paper written by some professor, and sold the media a bill of goods about how millions of women would be beaten up during or after the upcoming Superbowl game. Only one reporter bothered to chase down the original research paper and noticed that it said no such thing. All the rest of them bought it hook, line, and sinker. So here are millions of men watching a football game, and on comes a public service advertisement warning them not to get violent with the womenfolk. If the urge to punch or kick the wife became too great, they should turn off the game. What the Hell was that about?
Football... men... violence. Get it? The poor creatures are simply poisoned by their own testosterone. Brutes, every one. Women's magazines implored their readers to understand that yes, you've known him for twenty years and he seems totally harmless, but he's a man. It's only a matter of time before he goes off and stabs you a hundred times, and the children too. Get out of the house while you still can. See that? There's OJ. Stabbed her, didn't he. They're all like that. Even let them in your house and and sooner or later they will kill you or maim you. We've all seen these articles; the media is full of them. Men are brutes... genetic defectives. Keep them away from the children.
Well, that crusade is pretty much over. The legal environment is now set up to deal with these horrible creatures. All a woman has to do now to get one of these awful things out of her house is go downtown and sign a paper that she's scared that he might hit her. Has he ever even come close to such a thing? Well, no, but that doesn't matter. He's a man. Out of the house he goes, and if he comes back the police will arrest him. Due process? What's that? We don't need no stinking due process. You're a man; put on the cuffs.
Still a problem, though. There are these men who refuse to get out of the way of women who are trying to get promoted. They're really aggressive about getting ahead themselves, and some of them are damned good at their jobs. There needs to be a way for a woman to point her finger at one of these guys and make him go away. "Get him out of here," she'll say, and away he'll go. So now we have an epidemic of sexual harrassment. It's all over the media. These poor White House interns forced to perform unnatural acts just to out-do their mothers, who screwed Pavarotti. And once again, by the time we're done, the legal system has been changed. And company policies, too. Men are foced to sit in classrooms and listen to some smarmy bitch tell them that their days of forcing their secretaries to climb up on the desk are over. And sure enough, with a flick of the finger, women make troublesome men disappear. She felt harrassed. That really is the standard in law. You could look it up. Theree doesn't have to be any actual behavior; she just has to feel harrassed. Just like the wife only has to feel scared.
So how we have a legal system with a whole new twist to it. Force of law will now be applied to deprive men of liberty and property depending on how individual women feel. It's not about anything the men did. They don't have to do anything. Some woman just has to say she feels a certain way, and a man loses his job, or his house, or goes to jail, often without even a hearing or a chance to know why this is happening to him. Isn't this great?
And now this gayness thing. This is really weird. Mark Steyn has a good article this week concerning the remarkable progress our light-loafered friends have made at getting their, er, lifestyle not only accepted, but positively glorified. Gay people are just so cool now. Why, everyone should aspire to gayness, it's the coming thing. And if you can't be gay, at least be Metrosexual: go get a facial, and a pedicure. And some pretty shoes. And once again it's the same media game. We've gone from men are guilty (proving innocence isn't even enough anymore, see the DNA paternity cases) to men are genetic defectives who aren't safe to have around women or children, to the glorification of homosexuals and effeminacy, fer crissakes.
Your admonishment above is just another drop in the bucket. I don't really care where it's coming from in your case; you just spewed the thing in a moment of pique. It's in the zeitgeist and you latched onto it. I'm more interested in why this is a huge cultural force right now. On the face of it, the notion that we should encourage an organization like the Boy Scouts to allow openly homosexual men to serve as role models for pre-teen boys is, well, weird. But we have all these people advocating this, and a supposedly responsible outfit like the United Way withholding funds from Boy Scout troops unless they go along with it. And instead of people rising up with torches and pitchforks to march on the United Way offices, we have newspaper editorialists lauding the United Way for its "courage," while lambasting the Boy Scouts for being a bunch of old fuddy-duddies who don't understand that exposing boys to homosexual role models is just the height of modern cultural chic. And if you don't want your own son going off on camping trips with Lance and his friends, then you're a homophobe and an all-around neanderthal and you probably beat women, too.
I suppose that your remark above was meant to be cutting. Well, I'm 55 years old and it's a little late to be sowing doubts about my sexuality. I'm not in those "formative years" anymore. And similarly, when I heard all the crap about being a violent brute and a wolf in the office, I figured it was just a bunch of screaming women. Like all men, I have a notch filter for screaming women, so I just tuned them out. It wasn't until almost a decade into the "men are scum" media hurricane that I realized what this might be doing to boys. Here are authoritiy figures on television, and in the newspapers, explaining to little Johnny that men are genetic defectives, and that his ineluctable fate is to mature into a wife-beating, daughter-raping deadbeat dad. He can't help it. It's what he is. He is by nature bad.
Hmm. Is that a smart thing to be telling little kids? Why would a culture instruct its young men to believe that they are doomed to lives of depravity and waste, to causing harm, to being violent and predatory nuisances? Does anyone actually want that to happen? Why are we are doing it?
And now this. Fisting classes in high school... homosexual scoutmasters... the most flitty, prancing queens glorified on television as cultural icons... even women on Internet forums telling men they should go find a man. What is this about? The other nonsense was at least understandable as a grab for money and power. But what the Hell purpose is served by blasting confusing messages about human sexuality through the schools, the media, and academia? "Leftism" doesn't explain this. Homosexuality has never been an artifact of Marxism. This is something else entirely. Is it part of the cultural death wish, another aspect of failing to reproduce at replacement rate? Or is it, as 'longtermmemmory' suggests in #67, something more sinister... a truly outrageous and sick scheme by seriously disturbed lesbian wackos to rid the Earth of male humans, presumably so they can have all the girls to themselves? That would sound nuts if they weren't actually working diligently to make it happen.
Yes, another long, verbose post. That's because I refuse to have you set the agenda. Earlier I suggested that what you really wanted was to have us shut up and talk about what you wanted, which is of course you, and you have had some luck with that. But I want to talk about something else, and so I'm going to. |